UNKNOWING

Charlie Stuart Gay

Before the names were given,

I knew.

Before the maps insisted on their borders,

before the religions lost a translation of faith,

before language drew the first line

between the seer and the seen—

I knew.

• • •

The grandmother in Kenya

and the quantum priest

agree.

• • •

The child knows.

The dying know.

The seed in darkness knows

when to reach for light

it has never seen.

• • •

What I do not know

is in deed my wealth now.

We remember by forgetting.

We arrive by letting go.

• • •

Every tradition began with someone's direct experience of the sacred—a burning bush, a night journey, a bodhi tree, a vision quest. The mystics touched something that could only be held in silence. In that silence, nothing was separate yet. Then came the translators, the councils, the institutions—each generation one step further from the original fire. This book does not ask you to abandon your faith. It asks you to return to what your faith's founders actually experienced: the unknowing that precedes all doctrine, the direct encounter that no committee can legislate. The Sufi, the Kabbalist, the Christian mystic, the Mayan Abuelo, the Buddhist monk, the indigenous elder—they all nod at each other across the centuries, converging into a returning embrace of the Unknown. They know what was lost in translation. They sense the way back.